ARTICLES ABOUT PLASTIC SURGERY BY DATE - PAGE 4

As the holiday shopping season and mad scramble to find the perfect present begins, Neil Romain already knows exactly what he is buying this time around for his wife of 15 years: a gift certificate. Lest you peg his selection as unimaginative, this particular gift certificate is for a $300 appointment with a cosmetic surgeon to blast away her varicose veins. Ah, remember the days when the worst gift you could expect was a red and green Yuletide sweater with blinking lights and appliqued snowflakes and bells?

By STEPHEN G. HENDERSON and STEPHEN G. HENDERSON,SPECIAL TO THE SUN | October 9, 2005

Elisabeth Reed, a writer in Santa Fe, N.M., is an attractive 59-year-old who looks perhaps a decade younger. This, she believes, is because she never smoked, eats well and plays tennis regularly. Oh yes, there's one other possible explanation. Five years ago, she had a face-lift. "Someone showed me a picture of myself, and I saw a little droop in my neck that I'd had since I was 28. I thought it was high time to get rid of it," she explained. "What I hadn't realized, though, is that there are politics involved in cosmetic surgery.

Rock 'n' roll has provided an important service throughout its relatively brief history: getting hot dates for ugly guys. Sure, Elvis Presley arrived matinee-idol ready, but Paul McCartney was the only truly "cute" Beatle, and Beastie-men such as Mick Jagger, Jimi Hendrix, the members of Led Zeppelin, Alice Cooper, the members of Kiss (with or without makeup), David Lee Roth and Meat Loaf became studs under rock's hot spotlight. So it is that we've reached another milestone in rock's prolonged death march: Ozzy Osbourne got plastic surgery.

Dr. Thomas E. Jordan has joined the board of directors of Upper Chesapeake Health System as medical staff representative from Harford Memorial Hospital. Jordan is certified in otolaryngology and plastic surgery, according to the health system. He received his medical degree from the University of Maryland School of Medicine and completed his residency in general surgery and otolaryngology at Duke University Medical Center, then a residency in plastic surgery at Georgetown University Medical Center.

Dr. Bradley Robinson, a plastic surgeon associated with Upper Chesapeake Health System, has opened an office at 1 Barrington Place, Suite 106, Bel Air, the health system announced. Robinson is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and received his surgical and plastic surgery training at Hopkins. From 1992 to 2003, Robinson practiced plastic surgery at Maryland Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore, the health system said.

Leave it to the Internet to take panhandling to a new level. Laurentiu Mata (his friends call him Larry) tried to raise $2,700 for his wedding. (It was a bad idea, said Mata, 28. Nobody donated, but plenty gave him their two cents.) Joyce wants LASIK surgery. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of examples of cyberbegging, a trend made famous in 2002 when Karyn Bosnak created www.savekaryn.com to find donors to help her pay down $20,000 in credit-card debt. (She ended up with $13,323 in donations.

When stylist-to-the-stars Phillip Bloch tells Halle Berry to wear a dress, she's photographed in it in every magazine in America. When he tells Jessica Simpson to leave something on the rack, she drops it like a bad script. We caught up with Bloch at his home in Los Angeles yesterday to ask him a few really important questions about fashion, figures and all-around fabulousness. Here's what Bloch, who will be in town this weekend, had to say: Atkins or South Beach? I have a lot of friends on South Beach, so I have to say South Beach.

Can we cut? In a stroke of master casting, funny fashionista Joan Rivers will play herself in the season finale of Nip/Tuck, FX's hit drama about a booming plastic-surgery practice in Miami. It runs Oct. 5. "This is like John Gotti being on The Sopranos," says creator-executive producer Ryan Murphy. "It's the ultimate typecasting and the ultimate hot-button discussion topic." In the story line, Rivers, 71, who has done riffs on her many nips and tucks, goes to Drs. Sean McNamara (Dylan Walsh)

Like many plastic surgeons, Dr. Randal Haworth has developed a complex relationship with reality TV shows that feature surgical makeovers. Haworth, who set up shop in Beverly Hills, Calif., in 1995, readily acknowledges that he has benefited from the increased interest in plastic surgery that productions such as ABC's Extreme Makeover and MTV's I Want a Famous Face have sparked. In 2003, the number of cosmetic procedures performed nationally - from liposuction and tummy tucks to Botox treatments - jumped by 33 percent over the year before, reaching 8.7 million.